[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Artillery and sea units (PR#1476)

[Thanasis Kinias <tkinias@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

scripsit Richard Stallman:
>     I suspect the modern guns were the effect rather than the cause. Steel 
>     which you address below plus steam power meant that sailing rigging was
>     not required and the hull could be *armoured*. The guns then came along
>     to pierce the armour and do explosive rather than shrapnel type damage.
> 
> You may be right.  My point was only that destroyers, cruisers and
> battleships were made possible by the same technologies.

If we have (see below) a more subtle combat resolution, then their
different roles can be expressed.  Now, the cruiser is wholly obseleted
by the BB.

>     There is a power balance here that might become tricky. If they are
>     untouchable except by another battleship or later air power, this 
>     would seriously impact playability.
> 
> As I understand it, battleships really were hard to attack except by
> battleships, subs, and airpower.  You may be right that a large number
> of destroyers might have been able to defeat them, though suffering
> heavy losses.  My suggestion would not make it impossible for a
> destroyer to sink a battleship, just unlikely.  You would probably
> need to send in a lot of destroyers and you could expect to lose quite
> a few of them.

To be honest, the situation simply can't be handled properly by the
one-on-one combat system.  That's why I've suggested stack movement and
combat, as Civ:CTP finally did.  To "mob" a unit in Freeciv would
require stacking units, and if you wound up one movement point short,
then in his turn he toasts the whole stack.  The current handling of
stacks strongly favors dispersed strong units over concentrated weak
units.

I just don't have (unfortunately) the programming skills to implement a
patch to do this.

>     Another effect that would be nice is for faster ships to backoff when 
>     they get to a certain hitpoint level.
> 
> This seems unrealistic given that they had lesser range.  If they
> closed in on the battleship enough to bombard it, they would have to
> travel quite a ways to escape.

In actuality, there was not much difference in range between battleships
and cruisers.  Originally (pre-WWI), cruisers were not necessarily smaller than
battleships, but were un- or lightly armoured and weakly armed, but very
fast and carrying large bunkers of coal.  Their role was commerce
raiding and scouting ("cruising"), not forming part of the battle line.
Subs took over that raiding role, however, and cruisers became the
"middleweight" ships of the battle fleet.  Any good research library
will have old copies of Jane's Fighting Ships (the first edition was
circa 1898) where you can see what I'm describing.

The idea of retreating is important, however, because a slow unit in
reality cannot force a fast unit to give battle, absent an ambush.  This
is true as for battleships hunting destroyers as it is for infantry
trying to pursue cavalry or armour.  As has been mentioned here before,
destroyers came about to destroy torpedo boats, which were small,
fast, and agile, and couldn't be hunted effectively by the heavies.

Range of steam ships is at least hundreds of miles, more typically
thousands.  The longest-range guns ever deployed have circa 30 mile
range -- it doesn't take a lot of coal or oil to get outside of that
danger zone.

Given the current combat resolution system, I would allow a faster unit
(or an IGTER one) to retreat after one round of combat, unless fortified.

-- 
Thanasis Kinias
Web Developer, Information Technology
Graduate Student, Department of History
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A.

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